Category: Anti-Conservation

Supposedly, the members of an “eco-terrorist” group that called itself “The Family” have been rounded up and thrown in jail. “The Family” is said to be responsible for destroying, among other things, a horsemeat packing plant, a SUV dealership, power plants, and Forest Service equipment. You can read the full article here. Unfortunately, the article takes eco-warrior Edward Abbey?s name in vane, but also goes on to say that the people who were caught may not be responsible after all. The suspects seem rather unusual. For example: A woman who works in a home for the developmentally disabled, a manager of a department store, and a disc jockey from Portland, Oregon.

James Lovelock’s new book: Head North (or South) Younglings and Start Breeding! Ok, just kidding. Let’s get serious. His new book is actually called “Revenge of Gaia.” Sound spooky? It is! If you’re in your late teens or twenties, you may consider making plans to move to the North or South Poles so that you can help save the human race. This is what James Lovelock, the guy who penned the Gaia theory seems to be recommending these days. According to Lovelock, who is also an avid supporter of nuclear energy, the Earth is soon to catch a “morbid fever” that will leave all areas of the planet, save the arctic, inhospitable for 100,000 years. “Billions of us will die,” he says, “except for a few breeding pairs.” He says that there is still time to start a controlled abandonment of our modern destructive lifestyles, but he’s pretty pessimistic about the U.S. and China doing that anytime soon. Thoughts? Comments?

No need to grab your shotgun and blast that plague-carrying pest when you see a sparrow passing overhead. Experts say that there is little proof that wild birds can spread the deadly strain of avian flu that you’ve heard about in the press lately.

In a meeting of the International Waterbird Society in Taiwan, scientists confirmed that the greatest threat of the H5N1 strain of the bird flu is from poultry, not wild birds. While there is plenty of proof that poultry such as chickens can spread the disease, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that doves, sparrows, etc. spread the disease. There have been a lot of rumors to this effect recently but as usual, paranoia and panic can often reign over common sense and science.

Similarly, there is now a nearly maniacal obsession among policy makers and the Greens to conserve energy rather than to produce it. Even many of the oil companies are running ad campaigns on the virtues of using less energy (do the shareholders know about this?) — which would be like McDonald’s advising Americans to eat fewer hamburgers because a cow is a terrible thing to lose. A perverse logic has taken hold among the intelligentsia that progress can be measured by how much of the earth’s fuels we save, when in fact the history of human economic advancement, dating back to the invention of the wheel, has been defined by our ability to substitute technology and energy use for the planet’s one truly finite resource: human energy.